A History of Emotion in Western Music: A Thousand Years from Chant to Pop

432 Pages·14.697 MB·English

by  Michael Spitzer

A History of Emotion in Western Music

A History of Emotion
in Western Music
A Thousand Years from Chant to Pop
MICHAEL SPITZER
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Spitzer, Michael, author.
Title: A history of emotion in western music : a thousand years from chant to pop /
Michael Spitzer.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020015571 (print) | LCCN 2020015572 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190061753 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190061777 (epub) | ISBN 9780190061784
Subjects: LCSH: Emotions in music—History. | Music—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC ML3830 .S696 2020 (print) |
LCC ML3830 (ebook) | DDC 780/.0152—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015571
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015572
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For Karen, Emily, and Kiera
My Three Graces
Acknowledgments
Innumerable people have helped and influenced me during my work on this book.
Most of it was written after I migrated from the leafy groves of Durham to my vi-
brant academic home at the University of Liverpool. I would like to pick out for spe-
cial mention the following friends and colleagues: Vasili Byros, Tom Cochrane, Joe
Coughlan-A llen, Eduardo Coutinho, William Drabkin, Tuomas Eerola, Kenneth
Forkert-S mith, Robert Gjerdingen, Robin Hartwell, Robert Hatten, Giles Hooper,
Julian Horton, the late Adam Krims, Daniel Leech-W ilkinson, John Milsom, Max
Paddison, Nicholas Reyland, Alberto Sanna, Michal Talbot, Christian Thorau,
Edward Venn, and Richard Worth. Some shared valuable materials; many responded
to my ideas in drafts, conversations, or conference papers. While I have been deeply
inspired in particular by the endeavors of Patrik Juslin and David Huron, I don’t sup-
pose that they will approve of what I have done with their theories. Nor, in the mu-
sicology world, might Richard Taruskin, who once proclaimed, after a talk I gave at
Oxford, that I was “teetering on a precipice above quicksand.” For better or worse,
the gambit of taking 1,000 years of Western music as a single unit is inconceivable
without his example. Another spur to this project was the galaxy of scholars I met
at the First International Conference on Music and Emotion, which I organized at
Durham in 2009. Meeting their antipodean counterparts at ICME5 at Brisbane in
2017 was a satisfying bookend to the project.
In the production of this book, I have been incredibly fortunate to have Andrew
Maillot create such elegant music illustrations. Thank you to my editors at OUP,
Suzanne Ryan and Sean Decker, for shepherding me so expertly through the gates,
and to my two anonymous readers. I am particularly grateful for Suzanne’s con-
tinuing belief in the reality of this marathon project, including those years when
I seemed to disappear. . . . I thank the University of Liverpool for granting me re-
search leave to complete this book; and its School of the Arts for generously
subventing my musical illustrations. I owe the most thanks to my four supportive
families: the Irwins (Bea and Winston), the Clarkes (step forth Linda), the Hitchens,
(step forth Lilli), and the Spitzers, including my brother Dan, mother Angela and
my late father, John. I can never repay the incalculable debt I owe to my wife Karen
and our extraordinary daughters, Emily and Kiera (and our guinea pigs, Honey and
Piggle), for their love and faith, and for putting up with my decade- long bad mood.
Family life, enriched with music, is the best sentimental education one could ever
be blessed with. It is to my Three Graces that I dedicate this book.
* * *
xii Acknowledgments
Several chapters in this book incorporate material that has been published else-
where, and which I am reusing here with kind permission. I am grateful to:
Oxford University Press, for permission to reuse material from my chapter,
“Emotions,” from The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in
the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); and text from my chapter, “Shapes of
Affect in Bach’s Sonata in G minor for Unaccompanied Violin,” from Music and
Shape, edited by Daniel Leech-W ilkinson and Helen M. Prior (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018).
Cambridge University Press, for permission to reuse material from my chapter,
“Beethoven as Sentimentalist,” from Beethoven Studies 4, edited by Keith Chapin
and David Wyn Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Routledge, for permission to reuse material from my chapter, “Four Flavours of
Pre- Modern Emotion,” from The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification, edited
by Esti Sheinberg and William Dougherty (London: Routledge, 2020).
Part of Chapter 9, on popular music, appears in German translation within the
Handbuch Musikalische Analyse, edited by Oliver Schwab- Felisch, Ariane Jessulat,
Jan Philipp Sprick, and Christian Thorau (Berlin: Springer, 2020).
I am also grateful to Breitkopf & Härtel for permission to reproduce an excerpt
from Helmut Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel.
Introduction
“Why Not?”
It’s been dismaying, as a musicologist and music theorist, to stand on the beach and
watch the waves of emotion studies sweep through the humanities, sciences, and
social sciences and feel left behind. We are musicians— what do we know of emo-
tion? So I’ve dipped my toes in the ocean of affect and joined the swirl. They say you
should write the book you’d like to read, and here it is. My history of emotion is “a”
history, not “the” history. There is enough emotion going on in the first thousand
years of Western music to fill many libraries, hence a single volume is hopelessly
inadequate. It’s a start, and indeed, “Why not?” The reasons why not—w hy music
studies have previously side-s tepped the affective turn— are interesting, and I shall
go into them in due course. But it would be useful at this stage to start with a little
map of a large book.
The history cuts two ways. It chronicles how musical emotion in general changes
over the centuries, sharpening the conventional image with the latest lenses ground
by philosophers and psychologists. It also sketches a genealogy of the single
emotions—h appiness, fear, wonder, jealousy, boredom, and many others. Why was
anger originally a positive emotion, and when did fear first spread its wings? What
did the sublime steal from wonder, and is there really hope in the Hebrides? Do
musical emotions have scripts, and if so how do we analyze them? This book will
tell you. It proposes nothing less than a new way of analyzing music. The novelty
of its approach is to discover musical emotions in the techniques and materials of
composers and performers.
While the journey runs through many lands and time zones, its lodestar is an idea
so simple it can be expressed in a couple of sentences. Music’s character is its fate,
and listening for the emotion involves two bites of the cherry. Our first bite tastes
the emotion encapsulated in the musical material (its “character”); our second bite
chews over the emotion unfolded by the musical process (its “fate”). This principle
was first discovered by the Stoics more than two thousand years ago. This book
shows how it illuminates Western music from Gregorian chant to Machaut, Mozart,
Stockhausen, hip-h op, Beyoncé, and video games.
As in my earlier book on metaphor (Spitzer 2004), I have disposed the volume
in two halves, a theoretical part (“The Theory”) and an historical part (“The
Narrative”). Chapter 1 unpacks the Concepts of recent emotion scholarship,
introducing my theory. Chapter 2 elaborates the theory into a notion that we can
A History of Emotion in Western Music. Michael Spitzer, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190061753.001.0001
2 Introduction: “Why Not?”
hear emotionally through cognitive “processing styles” associated with emo-
tional Categories, or “basic emotions.” Chapter 3 explores the principles of mix-
ture producing emotional Compounds. Building on these theoretical foundations,
Chapter 4 reviews Histories of history of emotion, and proposes that the history of
musical emotion is organized in three moments of “before,” “during,” and “after.”
The heyday (“during”) of musical emotion—w hen it both fits our standard con-
cept of what emotions are, and reflects the experience of emotion in everyday life—
coincides with the common practice period of circa 1640– 1910. I call this Golden
Age the period of “affective realism.”
The period of affective realism (Chapters 6–8 ) constitutes the core of my histor-
ical narrative in the second half of my book, and moves from Passions (Chapter 6),
through Sentiments (Chapter 7), to Emotions (Chapter 8). The title of Chapter 8 is
doubly- determined, because the nineteenth century is when the modern concept of
“emotion” crystallized in the wake of Darwin and the first psychologists. This his-
torical core is book-e nded by chapters on early music “before emotion” (Chapter 5)
and on music post-1 910 “after emotion” (Chapter 9). The title of Chapter 9, Affects,
is also somewhat overdetermined because it reflects the foregrounding of “affect”
over “emotion” in the twentieth century. The “affective turn” is in many ways a re-
jection of “emotion.” This last chapter is by far the longest. I think it is important
to devote most time to where we are now. I also wanted to show how contempo-
rary music (both art- music and rock/ pop) helped create the climate for our dis-
passionate, even scientifically “objective,” interest in emotions; as well as filter our
history through its categories. In short, it honors the promise made in Chapter 1
that this history will be critically self- aware of its presuppositions, of the ground
beneath its feet.
Readers of my previous books will note an ongoing preoccupation with mu-
sical style, conceiving “style” in the broadest sense as a framework for producing
and understanding music. In Part I, musical emotion is quintessentially a “style” of
hearing, close to what psychologists call cognitive “processing style.” In Part II, the
shifting emotional paradigms (passions, sentiments, emotions, affects) are analo-
gous to systemic metaphors (Spitzer 2004), Adorno’s notion of musical “material”
(Spitzer 2006), and to what is nowadays fashionably called, after Bourdieu, “hab-
itus.” This hermeneutic concept of style probably derives from Schleiermacher, as
I noted in my work on Beethoven (Spitzer 2006).
This book, then, seeks to build on, deepen, and enrich my ongoing exploration of
the concept of musical style. The influence of Charles Rosen and Leonard B. Meyer
looms large, although in the context of a history of emotion, style is tasked with dif-
ferent sorts of philosophical and cognitive work. But in what sense, however, does
this history have any sort of motivating impulse or direction? Following William
Reddy, whose seminal The Navigation of Feeling (2001) kick- started this new disci-
pline of history of emotions, I see the engine of style change as the search for “emo-
tional freedom” and the alleviation of “emotional suffering.” I also follow Reddy’s
recuperation of Norbert Elias’s hydraulic model of emotion, reconfigured as a field
Introduction: “Why Not?” 3
of “emotives,” to understand the gradual civilizing of emotional style. I navigate the
deep sea of emotion historiography in Chapter 4.
In his 1880 The Power of Sound, Edmund Gurney, double- insider (of music
and psychology) and one of the unsung heroes of intellectual history, threw two
potentially devastating hand grenades at the entire enterprise of studying mu-
sical emotion. Grenade 1 put it to us that there was plenty of bad music that was
emotional. Grenade 2 objected that much great music is hard to pin down into
an emotional category (isn’t Viennese Classical music in the main emotionally
blank?). While Gurney’s provocations are splendidly anti- intellectual in the
English empiricist tradition (a tradition that, as an Englishman, I probably sub-
scribe to), the flack of these mini- detonations can be mostly waved aside. Musical
emotions can have an historical interest even when they are associated with bad
music; indeed, the inconsequentiality of the work can be useful in that it makes it
easier to isolate the emotion. Gurney’s second objection, at face value, is simply
wrong, since it prompts the question of what tools we use to analyze an emotion.
But his sly underlying question is more probing. Gurney is implying that the con-
sensual, “enlightened,” mode of listening to autonomous music as an autonomous
and educated subject should be cognitive and critical; attending, say, to the log-
ical unfolding of a formal process. The opposite of that is to vibrate uncritically
and immediately to sound like a jellyfish wobbling on the beach, a trope of late-
Romantic reception.
I would lob two counter- blasts at Gurney at this point—I answer him directly in
Chapter 8 and more generally elsewhere in the book. Gurney’s complaint commits
the cardinal error of post-K antian critics of emotion and musical emotion. It is
to lock emotion on the wrong side of a false binary between emotion and reason.
(Strictly speaking, the dualism is not “Cartesian.” The author of Les passions de l’âme
had plenty of time for emotion). The emotion/ reason dualism has been compre-
hensively demolished by the affective turn over the last fifty years. Indeed, this dem-
olition creates the field of possibility for this book to be written. Simply put, we now
know much more about how people in everyday life and creatures in their envi-
ronment use emotion perfectly “rationally” to appraise the world. Simpler put, the
psychological concept of “emotional appraisal” cuts straight through the middle of
the emotion/r eason dualism. Another example of forced choice is to ask whether
the object of a history of musical emotion is the “work” (whatever that might be), its
performance, or the listener’s reactions. The choice is forced because a competent
composer will have worked on stylistic materials consonant both with contempo-
rary performance practice and listener expectations.
The overarching, if mostly tacit, context of this book is the biologization of the
arts and sciences in the wake of the neo- Darwinian turn. It is beguiling to imagine
that, in the continuity it assumes between the affective life of humans and animals,
emotion is an umbilical chord back to Mother Nature. As it happens, the book
was completed at the same time as The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
(Spitzer 2021), my first foray into popular science. An experiment in global history